Richard Cumberland, Comic Force, and Misanthropy

Abstract

Richard Cumberland, Comic Force, and Misanthropy Eugene M. Waith I In 1775 Richard Cumberland published an ill-natured dedi­ cation with his comedy The Choleric Man, prompting Arthur Murphy to say, at the end of a severely unfavorable criticism of the principal character, that the true idea of a choleric man was to be found in the dedication.1 That this dedication should be a sample of Cumberland at his thorniest is especially ironic, since his chief concern was a theory of comedy to support his own benevolent comedies. He was replying to the charge that his comedy was (without acknowledgement) based on Shadwell’s Squire of Alsatia, and above all, to what he saw as an attack on him in “An Essay on the Theatre, or a Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy,” published in the Westmin­ ster Magazine, 1 January 1773. Both the tone of the dedication and Cumberland’s unconvincing denial that he had borrowed from Shadwell provided Sheridan with material for his devastat­ ing portrait of Cumberland as Sir Fretful Plagiary in The Critic. The reply to “An Essay on the Theatre,” however, was much more than a demonstration of spleen and wounded vanity. It was a serious attempt to challenge certain widely accepted ideas about the development and the nature of comedy. The “Dedication to Detraction” addressed in this one per­ sonified abstraction all those who had attacked Cumberland— the newspaper drama critics and the author of the “Essay on the Theatre,” who was not then known to be Oliver Goldsmith.2 Cumberland assumed that his comedy The Fashionable Lover (1772) was the specific butt of this attack on sentimental comedy, though there is little in the “Essay” to suggest that such 283 284 Comparative Drama was the case. What no one could miss was the attempt to show that sentimental comedy, by soliciting tears, ignored the function of comedy, which “should excite our laughter by ridiculously exhibiting the follies of the Lower part of Mankind.” The “one Argument in favour of Sentimental Comedy” was said to be that it was “of all others, the most easily written.”3 This sneer obviously hurt (“You insinuate that every blockhead can write Sentimental or pathetic Comedy"),4 but not so much as the implication that the writers of this kind of comedy were un­ aware of the traditional generic distinctions. Goldsmith had cited Aristotle and Boileau as examples of the “Great Masters in the Dramatic Art,” all of whom had agreed that pity was the pro­ vince of tragedy, as laughter and ridicule were of comedy. He admitted that Terence sometimes approached, yet always stopped short of, “the downright pathetic,” and pointed out that even he was “reproached by Caesar for wanting the vis comica. All the other comic writers of antiquity aim only at rendering folly or vice ridiculous. . . .”5 To be lectured to like a schoolboy, and, of all things, on the subject of classical tradition, was intolerable to Richard Bentley’s grandson, who had received an excellent education in the classics. He set out to demolish his unknown assailant with a truly formidable display of learning, accompanied by numer­ ous footnotes in both Latin and English: By this specimen of your acquaintance with the comic writers of antiquity, most learned Sir, I suspect that from the great attention you have bestowed upon the modems, you have had little to spare to their predecessors; for if it is your opinion that Terence of all the ancient comic poets made the nearest approaches to the pathetic, I fear you will have an host of authorities to combat? (p. ix) The most remarkable feature of the ensuing polemic is that under the guise of expounding the tradition to an ignoramus who has got it all wrong, Cumberland actually presents a littleknown , eccentric interpretation of Caesar’s words and a minority view of Terence.6 For Goldsmith was with the majority of commentators then as now in understanding Caesar to mean that Terence provided less laughter than other comic writers. While some eighteenth-century critics admired Terence for his de­ partures from Aristophanic and Plautine comedy,7 and others, like Goldsmith, praised him for not going too far...